Girl Walks Into a Bar (24 page)

A week later
and about four days into our toe ritual, I went in for a routine doctor’s visit and he saw that my amniotic fluid
was low. This can mean your placenta is conking out and you have to have the baby right away. I had had a completely normal pregnancy up until this time. John had been in New York on a visit and was at the airport to fly back to San Fran. I called him from the doctor’s office. “Um, they’re saying I might have to have the baby tonight.” He got on the phone with the doctor, who told him, “If I were you, I wouldn’t get on the plane.”

John came back from JFK, skeptical that this was going to be a “thing.” By now it was six
P.M.
and we went to get the ultrasound to get further info. The radiologist came back into the room and said, “Well! You’re havin’ a baby tonight!”

We’d had a stroke of luck: When I called John to tell him the fluid was low, he was at the gate, and his plane was about to start boarding. Another ten minutes and he would have missed the birth of his son.

This was a month before the baby was due. I hadn’t even packed a bag yet. We took a cab back to my apartment, where I frantically threw stuff into a tote bag. Umm, pajamas, some baby clothes to bring him home in, uh, an iPod. John said, “Do you want to bring a book?” “No.” I continued my frantic packing. Toothbrush! Phone charger! “You want to bring a book!?” “No.” Underwear! Camera! Slippers? “Now you’re sure you don’t want a book.” “I don’t know how to make this any clearer—I DON’T READ!” (Sometimes when you are so frantic, you need to boil yourself down to your basic bullet points. Sure, with more time and in calmer circumstances, I may have elaborated that I don’t read as often as I’d like, and I fritter away my time on the Internet or watching bad TV. I snapped out “I don’t read!” instead, as I certainly couldn’t imagine
recovering in the hospital as the time I was suddenly going to want to tuck into one of the ol’ classics. (“Ms. Dratch, may we check your catheter?” “Hold on. … I’m in a particularly riveting chapter of
Middlemarch
.”)

We got to the hospital. This was happening whether I was mentally prepared or not, so I could just coast along for the ride, as I had for the whole process. I had buried my head in the sand about all things birth-related. I am supersqueamish about medical stuff and this was the mother lode. I was going to have a C-section because the baby had to come out ASAP. I didn’t know this, but if your placenta is failing, it can’t sustain through a labor process. The decision had been made for me by circumstance. As I lay there waiting and just hanging out, I could hear the screams and moans of pain from a woman in the next room. “AAAAGGGGHH!” she cried. “AAAAAGGGGG-HHH!!”

Huh. Maybe I was lucky I was escaping from the natural earth-mama way after all.

I was brought into the operating room and was surprised by its stark and clinical quality. I was expecting a delivery room, like with some plaid curtains and maybe a poster of some badly rendered flowers. No. This was an OR. Metal instruments everywhere. Cold. No flower posters, ladies. I’m telling you all this because it’s the kind of stuff I always avoid reading. I had tuned it all out.

You get an epidural, which really wasn’t bad at all. Nothing hurt, but the anaesthesia makes you really cold, so I was shivering uncontrollably, shaking as if I were having a seizure. Then they lay you down on this table with your arms out in a
Christ pose, throw up a curtain so you can’t see your guts out on a table, and start the operation. I kept shaking and shaking and had the worst heartburn I’d ever had in my life. And I could feel a tugging in my guts … but nothing truly heinous. John was sitting up near my shoulder, being very sweet. “You’re doing great.” He also kept telling me to breathe, which is what you tell people who are going through labor. I wanted to tell him to stop telling me to breathe because it had nothing to do with my situation, but all I could bark out was a quick “Sh!” At one point, John stood to readjust his chair. Big mistake. He saw over the curtain—his Viet Nam experience, as he calls it. I’ve still never asked him what he saw, but I think it was my intestines.

Then we heard it … the Cry! The Cry from behind the curtain! It was so sweet and little and high! They brought The Baby, for he was still The Baby until we laid eyes on him, under some heat lamps to work on him because he had a little fluid in his lungs. I couldn’t quite see him where they had him, but John could. He looked over and aptly described our son upon seeing him in the first minute of his life. “He’s beautiful! … He’s a charmer!” Even having spotted him for mere seconds and from ten feet away, the fact is, John was exactly right.

Though I waited until the last day in the hospital to fill out the birth certificate, there was one name from my list that John liked as well, and it never lost its number one position, no matter what other names were tossed about. I officially let go of the name Herc, though it will forever have a place as his in utero nickname. My mother’s head remained intact. We named our baby Eli.

When we were sprung from the hospital, we waited at the elevator with two other couples, who seemed as dazed and clueless as we were. We were all being set free to care for these tiny creatures and just figure this out on our own. Looking at our faces, I wondered how the human race continues to survive.

“Do-It-Yourself Infant Care”or, If You Live Outside Manhattan, “Infant Care”

I opted not
to have a baby nurse when Eli was born. If you live anywhere but New York, you are thinking, “What the hell is a baby nurse? Was something medically wrong with your child?” Well, in Manhattan, it seems like everyone gets a “baby nurse.” A baby nurse is someone who is an expert in all things baby and who is there twenty-four hours a day for at least the first two weeks, although more often for a few months if you are really living it up NYC-style. With my one-bedroom apartment, I didn’t want to be negotiating around a stranger and a cot during this time. Same with a nanny. Everyone has a nanny here. But without a job to go to, there was really no need, and I wanted my space. I wasn’t reporting to a set, where my baby
could hang with the nanny while I was off shooting a scene. I was home, and I thought I’d feel weird having a stranger give my baby a bottle while I sat four feet away, nonchalantly watching TV and pounding Doritos. Besides, caring for my newborn was a whole new adventure—I finally had a project, a purpose, a something-to-do!

At this point in my life, I was glad to be doing things this way. If I were younger and still climbing the career ladder, if I hadn’t traveled as much yet, if I were still craving the party scene, I might feel differently, but because the baby came so late in the game, I didn’t feel torn about staying with him all the time. The big slowdown of my career, which initially felt like such a curse, actually felt quite fortunate now. I could truly say: “See that, Hollywood!? Mwah hah hah haaa! I’m the winner here! I get to stay here with my baby all day if I want to, all day, every day, and not leave him with my staff or a nanny. I don’t have to leave the house at six
A.M.
and get back at all hours of the evening. I get to be here day after day and not miss a moment! What’s that, Hollywood? You don’t care? Oh yeah? … Well … OK. Well. You just … you! … OK, forget it.”

John and I figured out everything as we went along—fascinating stuff like belly button maintenance, proper burping, and bottle sterilizing. If I had doubts about my child-care abilities, I’d think of teen mothers to make myself feel better. (There are sixteen-year-olds doing this on MTV! Surely, I can do it!) Without any outside help, there were definitely times when I was totally overwhelmed by all of my own little tasks that needed a couple minutes. I didn’t understand before I had a baby that, except when they are asleep, you have
no
time to
do anything. I don’t mean time for luxurious things like reading a magazine or talking on the phone or cooking yourself dinner. (We ordered delivery on a nightly basis for about six months, I believe.) I mean you don’t have time for such basic things as taking out the garbage or doing the dishes or taking a shower. Until he was about four months old and could roll over, Eli lay on a little pillow and watched me take a shower every day, so he may be scarred for life.

Eli was so tiny and delicate and sweet. At the beginning, I checked him obsessively as he slept in the bassinet next to the bed. “What are you doing?” John would whisper.

“I’m just checking him.”

“He’s
fine
,” came the voice from the darkness.

“Well, I’m a Neurotic Jew!” I retorted.

“Well, take it easy, N.J.”

One night, John was asleep and I crept over to Eli, trying to make out his figure in the bassinet and just make sure he was breathing. I crept back silently into the bed, thinking my check went unnoticed. Two seconds later, I heard a whisper from half-asleep John.

“What’s going on, N.J.?”

Busted.

I was never
getting more than four hours of sleep straight for a stretch, if that, and this went on for two or three months, yet everyone said I was glowing. I
felt
like I was glowing. The
SNL
schedule was perfect training for motherhood; I was used to crazy nighttime hours. Being awake at three in the morning,
in the dead of night when the streets are pretty quiet, didn’t feel at all weird to me. It actually felt quite normal. And I was fortunate enough to avoid the ’mones that make you crazy and sad after giving birth. If anything, I was feeling euphoric. Sure, I had a few meltdowns when I could not get Eli to sleep after trying for hours. One morning at around five
A.M.
, when Eli was about two months old, I was sobbing, walking around the apartment with him screaming and me just saying, “Please go to sleeeeep.”

ELI:
Waaaaaaah.

ME:
Sob. Sniffle. Snort.

ELI:
Waaaaaaah.

ME:
Waaaaaaah.

ELI:
Waaaaaaah.

BOTH OF US IN UNISON:
WAAAAAAAH!

Actually, this very incident cemented the fact for me that I am a horrible dramatic actor. Later that day, I had an audition for the show
Nurse Jackie
in front of the director, who, for this episode, happened to be Steve Buscemi. Having just spent the very early hours of the morning crying with frustration because Eli wouldn’t sleep, I had to go in and audition to play a mom who is crying in frustration because her kids are driving her crazy. I had just had pretty much the
exact
experience in real life that morning, yet when faced with replicating it in an acting situation, I tanked it hard. I could hear myself reciting the lines, not being the character at all. While I was reading the lines, simultaneously a voice was sounding in my head,
literally saying the words “
Get out of the business. Get out of the business.
” Because I respect Steve Buscemi so much, I was embarrassed to the point that I now think of that as the Worst Audition of My Life. As an actor, I can say that the only good thing about the Worst Audition of Your Life is you can pretty much be sure another one will come along to knock it out of first position, sometime in the not-so-distant future.

My only other case of extreme hormones after the birth was when I cried because I missed one of my favorite TV shows. To make the pain even worse, I realized that I only
thought
I had missed it and then, when I turned on the TV, discovered I could have been watching it for the whole hour. That’s when I started to cry, at the realization of my grave error. John was there to witness my crying breakdown. I knew I was being ridiculous, but that did not stop the tears and half laughing, half sincere whimpering that was happening. The show I had missed?
RuPaul’s Drag Race
. Some may relax with a warm bath, their favorite music, or a foot rub from a loved one; I had had a particularly exhausting day of child care, and that night I just really needed my drag queens.